The Innocent Price of Freedom
by Jade Sabre
Summary: Morrigan's unwilling journey towards motherhood and all its joys. A 2014 DA Reverse Big Bang entry to accompany Alamarri's fanart.


**Title:** The Innocent Price of Freedom  
**Author:** Jade Sabre  
**  
Notes:** Here's the first of my 2014 Dragon Age Reverse Big Bang stories, this one for Alamarri's lovely fanart of Morrigan and the godbaby. In case you've never met me, I have a fierce and undying love for both of them, and I was really excited to have the opportunity to work with such lovely art of them.

* * *

Morrigan didn't want to be Flemeth when she grew up.

Later on she would mean this quite literally, but as a girl she simply knew she didn't want to be stuck living in some tiny hut in the middle of the Wilds doing obscure magic for no particular purpose, content to be a living legend long thought dead. She didn't want to spend her days with no one but the wind to talk to, to have a child just for the sake of having someone to experiment on. She didn't want to scare Chasind away with tricks out of a bedtime story, with nothing but the barest hint of a whisper of her name, and she certainly didn't want to waste time running away from templars.

She wanted...something else. Something like golden mirrors, and storied laughter around a campfire. And the world, yes, she wanted that, mountains and rivers and oceans and all the people in between, _people_, in all their finery, yes. She wanted that.

But then she grew up in a tiny hut in the middle of the Wilds doing obscure magic with no one to talk to but her mother, who just as often didn't want to talk, scaring away anyone else who might try to disturb their peace; and she learned to disdain the outside world, to content herself with days exploring the Wilds and nights sleeping snug in a bed this side of too small. She learned to treat the concerns of men as stupid and women as—petty, so long as they were not her mother's concerns, though the latter remained mostly a mystery to her. She turned her own concerns to her magic, her shapeshifting, her knowledge; but even in this Flemeth stifled her, keeping her grimoire out of her reach, answering so many questions with a mere, "One day, child, you'll understand," and Morrigan, who could imagine no other life than this, longed for—_golden mirrors_, and chastised herself for such childish dreams.

And then one night, as she sat waiting, tending the hearthfire, as rain lashed the thatched roof and darkspawn cries reached even her little oasis, her mother came home with two unconscious Grey Wardens in tow and forced upon her something else entirely.

"A _baby_?" she said, horrified, as Flemeth smeared poultices across the male Warden's bloody torso.

"Yes," Flemeth said, unconcerned, magic Morrigan didn't know radiating from her fingertips. "We're lucky one of them is a man, or else we'd have no hope of seizing this opportunity."

"_We_," Morrigan retorted, otherwise speechless. She tried to think of the babies she'd seen—she could count them on one hand, small faces peeking out of Chasind bundles slung over their mothers' backs. "What on earth sort of opportunity—"

"The untainted soul of an Old God is no small thing," Flemeth said, "though it may come in a small package. And I'm too old, and so the task falls to you. A failure of the human form," she said, in the way she had of hers, as though the human form was a choice, "but better a human than a dwarf.

"You must have the timing right," she added, tucking an organ or two into place as Morrigan continued her quest for the correct word to express her utter—_well_. "It must be done within the week before the Archdemon is killed, otherwise you'll have to try again. And for goodness's sake, girl, mind that you don't get pregnant beforehand."

"_Mother_," she said, which was as good a word as any.

"He's a handsome one," Flemeth pointed out.

"He's a fool," Morrigan said, warming to her subject. "And I know that's never stopped _you_ in the past, but—"

"He's a tool, and you might as well enjoy yourself," Flemeth said, smoothing skin into place with what suddenly struck Morrigan as a rather lecherous amusement.

She shuddered. "Are you _sure_ you cannot do it yourself?"

"Lay with him, or bear a child?"

"Mother, _please_."

Flemeth gave the man's chest one last pat and turned to her, her face a strange mixture of sentiments Morrigan couldn't quite identify; a hardness, yes, but something that was uncomfortably close to pity, and Flemeth didn't believe in pity.

"Morrigan," she said, "it is no small task I am giving you, but you will come to understand its importance. And it is not impossible, either. I've done it more times than I can count."

"But I've _never_ done it," Morrigan said, acutely aware her tone could be construed as whining.

"Then you will learn," Flemeth said simply, resting her hands on her knees before pushing herself to her feet, sighing and shuffling to the hearth, plucking her grimoire off the shelf. Morrigan's breath caught as Flemeth opened the book and flipped through the pages, bringing it to the table and waving her over as she searched for the right page. "Ah," she said, finding it, "yes, come here, and I'll tell you what must be done."

"Yes, Mother," Morrigan said, joining her at the table, anticipation warring with the sense that a _baby_ was too high a price to pay even for a peek inside—

"There are worse names, you know," Flemeth said, running her finger down the page.

Morrigan's stomach churned even as she leaned over her shoulder, squinting to make sense of the script as familiar as her own. Blood, of course, and lyrium, favors bargained and returned, and of course the necessary—

All this, for a _soul_. A soul in want of a vessel, and her body the ample provider.

* * *

Morrigan didn't want to be a mother.

An afternoon in the Redcliffe Chantry was enough to convince her of this, so many mothers nursing their babes, swaddling their babes, looking desperate and haunted as their children cried with no hope of ceasing. At least babes were portable; the older children ran wild, the worst being the boy who'd locked himself in a cupboard for some pigheaded dream of a sword. Of course, _she'd_ run wild too; but she'd had _sense_, and a proper sense of self-preservation. These children were—fools, and the thought of having one dependent on her was—

She refused to be afraid.

So she pushed it from her mind; after all, traveling with the Warden, staying alive in the face of werewolves and angry dwarves and abominations, these were all more than enough to occupy the entirety of her concentration. The impossibility of their task made her impending motherhood an unlikely event at best, never mind the discovery of her own mother's desire to possess her body. If Flemeth succeeded she'd probably barely have time to be a mother before having it snatched from her along with everything else, and _that_ she would not tolerate. So she went to the Warden with her concerns and the Warden _listened_, was duly horrified, yes, but also—_determined_, solemn in her promise to help, and Morrigan watched her make the trek back to the rest of the camp, scratching the mabari's head as he bounds to her feet, unconscious of the quiet battle in Morrigan's heart.

The Warden succeeded, brought back Flemeth's grimoire, and for the first time Morrigan was able to read everything the old witch had ever kept from her, learned of the ultimate futility of the Warden's actions—but she didn't tell the Warden, who was happy to have helped, to have accomplished _something_ in the midst of a million murky choices. "Though it would have been nice to know," she said, breaking bread at Morrigan's campfire, recounting the battle, "that she could turn into a dragon."

Ah. "I apologize," Morrigan said. "I forgot you were unconscious when she brought you to the house. I would have thought you would have remembered the journey."

"Are you saying a dragon carried Alistair and I from the top of the Tower of Ishal to the middle of the Wilds, and no one's telling that tale?" The Warden laughed, though there was a sadness to it. There was a sadness to everything she said. "I suppose they were all preoccupied with dying."

"They probably thought they were seeing the archdemon," Morrigan said.

"Then at least they died knowing it was a Blight," she said. "Even if that wasn't quite what they saw." She looked at Morrigan, who dropped her eyes to the grimoire, running her fingers over its leafless tree. "I killed your mother."

"Thank you for that," she said.

"And you're all right?"

"She would have killed me," Morrigan said, unable to keep a strangely hollow note out of her voice. She would only try again. "'Tis unusual, perhaps, but she was never a...normal mother."

"Now _that's_ not so unusual, I don't think," the Warden said, half-smiling. "Still, they say betrayal from the closest corner hurts the most."

"I have had time to grow accustomed to it," Morrigan said, the closest she would come to the answer for which the Warden would not ask. She deflected the conversation. "All the more reason for you to keep a close eye on that assassin."

The Warden laughed at that, loud enough to draw the others' attention, and Morrigan barely restrained a sigh. "Don't worry," she said. "Zevran knows that if he ever drew a knife on me you'd turn him into a toad before he could land a single hit. Alistair's been quite descriptive."

"Fools," Morrigan sniffed, and the Warden only laughed again.

That night, she reread the ritual; not only the steps Flemeth had shown her, but the deeper theories and reasonings behind them, the descriptions of how a Grey Warden ended a Blight under normal circumstances, a soul for a soul—obliteration. She snapped the book shut and heard the Warden's laughter in the wind whistling through the grasses, saw a woman fated to face a dragon willing to take on another simply for the sake of someone else's asking. She saw blood and lyrium and the necessary—she saw a big belly, a screwed-up squalling face, a lifetime not her own yet her responsibility nonetheless—she saw—

All this, for the life of a friend.

* * *

Morrigan _definitively_ did not want to be pregnant.

She only realized this once it was too late, of course, once a journey that had taken two weeks with the Warden had stretched into four because her body simply refused to keep moving when she told it to. The Bannorn was hardly difficult terrain, and yet she found herself sleeping every chance she got, lying down in a hollow for what she told herself would be just a moment or two to escape the noonday sun and waking in the late afternoon because _something_ in her abdomen _hurt._ _Again_. That pain never lasted very long, as opposed to her breasts, which were escaping their bindings at an alarming rate. Slipping into an animal form brought very little relief; she was still _tired_, no matter what she did.

And then, just when she'd finally settled into the aches and the tiredness, just when she'd resigned herself to spending the rest of her time at the foothills of the Frostbacks because the prospect of climbing them was simply too enormous, she started to grow _out_. She was glad to be rid of the exhaustion, glad to start climbing the hidden passes learned from eagles and the light snowprints of passing cats, but the going was slow and she was hungry and sore and kept growing and of course she was growing, and her irrational displeasure with the situation only added to her irritation. And, occasionally, to her hour-long tirades at nettles and snowdrifts and on one forgettable occasion a lone ewe who was taking advantage of the best bit of shelter for miles around.

"You have layers of wool," Morrigan told the unperturbed animal, chewing its cud and staring at her balefully. It had probably never seen a human before, and certainly had no qualms about standing—well, lying—its ground, comfortably surrounded by rock on three sides and the branches of one of the few remaining bushes at this height. "You are perfectly suited towards wandering the wastes for hours, even in twilight, whereas _I_ have nothing but a poor fur coat better suited for sitting around a hearthfire. And yes, I can provide a fire, but there's no hearth here, and furthermore, would you—just—_move—_"

The sheep continued staring. Morrigan took another sharp breath of thin mountain air, sighed, and simply crawled in next to it. _This_ the sheep did not like, but with a touch of her hand she sent it to sleep and curled next to it. "You are trying to survive," she said, aware that she should be conserving her breath and babbling anyway. "'Tis the wrong season for it," she muttered, shifting her breasts, her hand absently running over the bulge that had recently gone from "noticeable" to "mildly inconvenient" and—

Something _moved_, a hiccup, perhaps, or her stomach, tired of lichens and berries and the occasional roasted hare, yes—_no_, a little flutter, and there again, and then a stillness, and she realized she was holding her breath, her hand pressed against herself. It _moved_.

Of course it moved. It was a baby, and babies were, she had observed, incredibly squirmy. But it was moving _now_, inside of her, and there was no one to tell but the wind.

The wind, and the increasingly smelly animal radiating a comforting warmth. She was suddenly aware of how she ached, all over, how her feet chafed in her boots and her hands were red and raw from the cold and the rock and how she _missed—_

You chose this, she told herself firmly, ignoring the voice that informed her it hadn't been much of a choice at all. All this, for the sake of an unheard heartbeat—

* * *

and ye _spirits_ and demons, Morrigan did _not_ want to be in labor.

She wanted to be in labor alone even less, and so she stumbled towards the light of one of the many farmhouses it had been so very vital to avoid until a few scant hours before. She made it to the edge of the barn before the pain's intensity tore a cry from her unwilling throat, startling the pigs at their trough. She eyed them with equal displeasure as the pain faded, leaving her leaning against the barn with shaking legs and a strong desire to lie down and die. She gulped down air in the brief respite and focused on the rough-hewn wood under her hand, toddling along the wall towards the house beyond, smoke curling above its chimney in the late afternoon sun.

And then she stopped again, nearly doubling over, another cry coming loose as she _pushed_ and this was so much worse than any battle she'd been in, worse than that time she'd stepped on the remnants of a revenant's phylactery while dodging a blow that could have decapitated her and instead merely flayed her shoulder and the stitches that had followed—perhaps it wasn't _that_ bad, but the flavor, the feeling of coming apart in ways she wasn't meant to, the _stabbing_, that was all the same.

"Mama!" she heard a voice call, and for a hallucinatory moment she thought it was her own child, but of course it wasn't because the damn thing was _still inside_ her and Flemeth probably didn't put up with this nonsense any more, with all the daughters she'd had, but there hadn't been anything in the grimoire about easing the process and she settled with cursing her mother and all Grey Wardens and _especially_ the darkspawn and their taint and—

"_Qui est-ce_?" asked a voice, but her head was back against the wall and her eyes were squeezed shut and she couldn't bring herself to respond, and then there was more babbling that she interrupted with another yell and then people were _touching_ her and she couldn't fend them off and push at the same time and _anyway_, she thought, as the pain subsided and she gained enough control over her feet to follow where they led, this was precisely the _point_ of—

"Maker's _breath_," she swore, not because she particularly believed in the Maker but because it was the only curse that came to mind, and she heard the word "Fereldan" and then they were inside and there was a bed and pillows—she opened her eyes, saw a plain farmwife and a boy and a girl leaning over her, the mother bossing her children around—bossing, she thought, closing her eyes, was something she could do, and then the pain started again and she wished for the Maker's breath because she certainly didn't have any of her own—

And it kept _coming_, the pain, beginning again just as she caught a moment's relief and then not waiting even that long, and someone gave her something to bite down on and someone else had her hand and she squeezed both and leaned forward and _pushed_ again, vaguely aware of the rough blanket sticking to her sweaty—she would need to bathe—and it _hurt_ and she was wailing and crying and making a horrible mess in front of _strangers_ and she wished and she couldn't think long enough of what she wished for but she _wished—_

—for death, for water, to be _done done done done done push done_ to stop pushing to crawl out of the skin that was hurting so very very badly no not just hurt ripping tearing apart it wasn't—

"There's the head!" said a voice and it sounded like Leliana and the _last_ person Morrigan wanted was—and then her mind went blank and someone was shouting at her to push and she felt magic suddenly crackling in the air around her and she bit down harder as the leather in her mouth turned to ice—_wonderful_ ice, and she was so startled she almost forgot to—_push—_

"A boy!" someone said as something slithered out of her and she gasped she could _breathe_ and then her body seized up pushing again and—all this—

a _boy_?

—all this, for—

* * *

Ten little fingers and ten little toes. And a head of thick black hair, which the farmwife's daughter was cooing over as Morrigan stared bemusedly at the little boy—_boy—_in the bed next to her, swaddled, his little eyes squeezed shut as he slept the sleep of the well-fed and satisfied. He'd blinked through the process of eating, giving little gold glimpses as he glanced up at her face with an unnerving concentration, as though she were the only thing that mattered in his little world.

'Twas nonsense, of course, to be so enamored of the utter perfection confronting her, but she was lightheaded and dizzy and exhausted and vaguely willing to excuse herself. A _boy_. She'd broken the cycle of Flemeth's daughters for the sake of an Old God's soul and all she could think was how _little_ he was, this little baby boy. She had felt so huge and yet he was so little and—sleep. She needed sleep. She would only close her eyes a moment...

She woke to a thin, wailing cry, a terrifying absence next to her, and she saw the farmwife's daughter holding her child and _lunged—_or would have, had not the tangle of blankets and her own exhaustion prevented her from doing anything more than lurching a little to the side. She barely had time to be disgusted with herself, and then the girl was handing her the baby—his little face red and scrunched, his toothless mouth gumming at air—and helping her settle him at her breast, where his cries turned into squelching sucking noises that were oddly hypnotic.

She could, she thought, look away at any time. She stared at him, touched the soft hair of his soft head, tried to remind herself that he was more than a boy, more than a baby, commanded powers she'd never dreamed of, would one day overshadow everything she'd ever accomplished—

She'd accomplished _this_, and this was somehow more terrifying than anything she thought he'd be able to do.

She took stock of her aches and pains as he slept, healed herself with clumsy spells learnt by watching the Circle mage from the corner of her eye, prepared herself for another journey under cover of darkness, though this night was lit with stars and moonlight instead of the pyres of a Blight. She made a sling from her cowl and wrapped the baby close to her chest, gathered her staff, donned her boots, thought of the silent footfalls of a hunting cat as she padded her way out the door, where outside the farmwife sat in a small chair with a pack on her lap, waiting for her.

She hesitated; the farmwife untied the pack and showed her the contents: food, a knit blanket, baby clothes, napkins. "No longer need," the farmwife said, retying its knots and holding it out as Morrigan's throat closed and her eyes, to her horror, prickled hotly. "For your son."

Her _son_.

She took the pack and slung it across her back, nodded wordlessly, and stepped into the night, heading for—_somewhere_, though surely she would know soon enough. The baby stirred as she walked but did not wake, on tiny hand working its way free, tangling in the golden ropes around her neck. She reached up to discourage this, her fingers stroking the back of his hand as she tugged, and she stopped in her tracks when he let go, when he—

All this, for little fingers curling around hers, for a love she didn't want, fiercer and more fearsome than any magic, tangling in her heart; all this, for—a son, to call her mother.


End file.
